Internship Experience

Internships are pretty much essential to a college student’s career path today. Many companies value experience over the amount of education you’ve had in the field. Simply attending college courses on the related field is not enough. I’ve come to realize that many of the topics that we cover in class are not used much outside of the classroom. I had no experience in the web design field, so how was I supposed to pursue that as my future career? Luckily for me, I scored an internship here at WebMasterIcons that required no experience. I figured that this would be an excellent opportunity for me to learn more about web design.

I’ve been an intern here at WebMasterIcons for almost a month now. Throughout this time period, I’ve learned quite a bit about web design and how some of the aspects of it works. The business aspect, for instance, was definitely new to me. I never even thought about how communicating with the client worked (pricing, contract and proposal processes, drafting, etc). I was introduced to this on my first week here and it was pretty amazing to see how everything comes together.

As a web designer, one of the important skills you need is learning how to ask your client the right questions. That is definitely a weakness of mine as shown when I worked on a project assigned by a fellow coworker. I did not know how to ask the right questions to understand what he really wanted and ended up redoing the draft about three times.

This internship has taught me a great deal already. I walked in not knowing a single thing about web design. Now I am aware of the business/client aspect, different styles and layouts, basic idea of how to draft a website, considering different factors when designing a website (not everything that you design can be used or is practical for the website) and more. With a little over a month left here, I hope to gain as much knowledge as I can before I leave.